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Friday, 26 October 2012

Everything I seem to do lately, work wise, seems to involve
sitting down. Reading, writing, studying, , blogging, tweeting and edits…all at
my laptop. Ok, granted, between all this I’m usually running around after my
toddler but I don't think that really counts as exercise, and I’ve just been
itching recently to get active. I used to be super fit at one point in my life,
I’d run most days, do dance classes, yoga and martial arts. But then I had two
children in quick succession and now I feel lazy and flabby, and desperately in
need of tackling this post baby weight, (you know you need to do something
drastic when your fiancé starts hiding the biscuits when he goes to work!). I
know I’m not fat, I just feel like I will be if I don’t start getting my act
together soon. So, I joined the local gym. Now, I don’t usually ‘gym’ it, I’ve
always felt its fake exercise, you know? Why run on a treadmill when you could
run outside for free? But since the nights are drawing in, it’s just safer and more
convenient to go the gym in my spare time. Also I live in town now rather than
on the beach, so no more running on the sands (which, for anybody who’s ever
done that, it is NOT as glamorous as it looks, running on sand is the most
difficult workout ever!) Anyway, I’m getting carried away. The point I was
trying to get to with this is that there are definitely some perks to going to
the gym. Eye candy! The local rugby team are always in there. Yes, obviously, I’m very happily engaged, and I am
a mother, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t look does it? Besides…I have to
get inspiration for the heroes in my stories somewhere right?

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Oh goodness, I didn’t realise how long it had been!
Basically I’ve been so caught up with other things I just haven’t got round to
blogging. Anybody who follows my blog will probably know by now that this is
the story of my life, but I will try and blog a little more over the next few
months, especially since the release of Business and Pleasure is getting ever
closer! In just two short months you’ll be able to get your hands on this, and
I really can’t wait to share it with you.

So what have I been doing these last few weeks that has kept
me so quiet on the blogging front? Well, I’m pleased to say that the exam I’ve
been going on about is finally done and dusted! Now I just have to wait around
for the results. Now that is out the way I get to focus on writing and editing.
Yep, I’ve been a busy little bee editing the first two stories in my series ‘Rags
and Riches’, but I’ve also been super busy writing the third. I am loving
writing this one, and getting a bit carried away with it, but I’m in the
chopping/changing and rewriting stage now, which usually takes me longer than
actually writing!

I’ve also lifted my self-imposed book ban. I had to torture
myself a little this past month because I was getting side-tracked by books
every time I tried to settle down to get any work done, since I had a pile of
academic books to get through, I had to cut all fiction but my own out of my
life for a while, but now I have the biggest backlog of things that I want to
read, and that’s before I check out the latest releases. I’m a bit out of
touch, so if you know of any great reads that have come out in the last couple
of weeks, please let me know!

Monday, 1 October 2012

I now have seventeen day ban on reading anything other than
my text books. I know, sad times. It’s just that I really do need to do well in
this upcoming exam, and I keep getting side tracked by all the lovely authors
out there sharing their wonderful stories with me. I have enough to do with
editing and writing my own stories right now to keep me busy between revision
sessions, and seriously, I have to take drastic measures to avoid distraction
because I don’t think my knowledge of contemporary romance is really going to
help me explain the many different ways in which you can categorise Athenian
vases!

You might wonder why, at this stage in my life, I have
chosen to do a degree. Sometimes, I wonder that too! No, the fact is that
straight out of high school it just wasn’t the right time for me to go away to
university for a number of reasons, and then even though I tried a few
different kinds of courses, I basically just got sucked into the working world
and never really got around to going.

The reason I finally decided to do it now was that there are
two genres of romance that I love, contemporary and historical. Obviously,
contemporary is the most straight-forward to write because it doesn’t require
much research in comparison with historical. Now, I could, and do, just read a
lot of factual history books to learn about the era’s I want to write about,
but then once, when I was surfing the net I stumbled upon the OU, an online
university that allows you to do a degree from the comfort of your own home,
for those of you that don’t know. When I saw the classical studies degree I
thought, why not? It kills two birds with one stone for me really, I get to
learn a lot about the history that I want to write about, and I have a
qualification to show for it at the end.

So, until the 17th of October is over, I’m afraid
I won’tbe allowing myself the luxury of
reading and enjoying fiction, but you can bet I’ll have a list as long as my
arm of stories I want to read at the end of it. Let’s just hope it’s worth it
and my commitment pays off this time around! Thank you all for reading J